30 Years Later, a Watergate Allegation
Former Aide Contends Nixon Ordered Burglary
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By David Von Drehle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 27, 2003; Page A05
Thirty years after the Senate select committee hearings on Watergate riveted the nation and doomed the Nixon presidency, a key figure in the scandal says he has a fresh and explosive revelation: Richard M. Nixon personally ordered the burglary of Democratic headquarters at the Watergate complex.
Jeb Stuart Magruder -- then a "callow" campaign aide, now a retired Presbyterian minister in Ohio -- says in a new documentary for PBS that he heard Nixon's voice on a telephone as the president instructed then-Attorney General John N. Mitchell to go ahead with the break-in.
" 'John . . . you need to do that,' " Magruder said he heard Nixon say at the end of a phone call in which Mitchell discussed the matter with his boss.
If true, the allegation could significantly sharpen history's answer to one of the most famous questions of modern America: What did the president know, and when did he know it?
In 1974, Nixon became the only U.S. president to resign from office, after a botched attempt to wiretap the opposition party's offices metastasized into a conspiracy to cover up White House involvement in the crime. After the Senate hearings uncovered the existence of secret White House tapes that eventually confirmed Nixon's involvement in the cover-up, the president resigned rather than face impeachment.
Magruder was in a position to hear the conversation he describes. As deputy director of Nixon's 1972 reelection campaign, Magruder was a trusted colleague of senior figures in the scandal, including Mitchell, White House counsel John W. Dean and Chief of Staff H.R. "Bob" Haldeman. At the same time, he had regular dealings with G. Gordon Liddy, who planned the burglary.
Nevertheless, leading Watergate authorities are skeptical.
"Where's the tape?" asked Stanley I. Kutler of the University of Wisconsin, an expert on the elaborate system of voice-activated tape recorders installed in the Nixon White House to capture every presidential word. Kutler compiled a well-regarded volume of Watergate-related tape transcripts.
If Nixon gave the order, "I find it implausible that it was not recorded," Kutler said. And while not all of the tapes have been made public, "it's so unlikely that a tape of this value would not have turned up by this point," he said.
Historian Richard Reeves took a different tack. It's entirely believable that Nixon ordered the break-in, Reeves said. "But I'm not sure I believe the story, or the source," he said. "Magruder has had so many cuts at the ball. It's astounding to me that each time up to now, he lied about it."
Magruder told his story in an interview for "Watergate Plus 30: Shadow of History," a PBS documentary produced in association with The Washington Post. It will be broadcast Wednesday night.
Sherry Jones, the documentary's executive producer, said last week that she searched unsuccessfully for a record of the alleged phone call in the voluminous archive of Nixon tapes and in the daily White House phone log from March 30, 1972.
However, she said she found that not all calls to the White House were logged. "We found Haldeman taking calls in the Oval Office that aren't logged," she said. "You can hear him in the background of some tapes."
Washington lawyer Richard Ben-Veniste was a key aide to Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. In that role, he supervised "days and weeks and months" of debriefing Magruder after prosecutors persuaded him to testify as part of a plea bargain. Told of the new version of events, he laughed.
"Magruder had every opportunity to reveal this information" 30 years ago, Ben-Veniste said last week. "I remember Magruder trying to curry favor with prosecutors, so I wonder what his motivation was for not revealing this."
Magruder said there was a simple reason he held back the key detail: He hoped Nixon would pardon him. He said he held out hope that Nixon would save him from prison "until we were in prison and Nixon was forced to resign."
Magruder served seven months for obstruction of justice.
In later years, he said, he was building a new life as a Presbyterian minister and would not have relished the publicity that would have come from leveling a charge that the other three participants in the scene -- Nixon, Mitchell and Haldeman -- would likely deny. But now the three are dead and Magruder's career has ended.
Magruder said he nearly died last year after his aortic valve tore and he began bleeding internally. "I started reflecting on some things," he said. The decision to tell the story "sort of came out of that."
Magruder had good reason to think that Nixon might help him if he held the line during his grand jury hearings and Senate testimony. A tape of a July 19, 1972, conversation between Nixon and his top aide John D. Ehrlichman captured Ehrlichman saying that "Magruder is probably going to have to take the slide" for Watergate. "It's a hell of a . . . thing," Nixon answers a moment later. "I hate to see it, but let me say we'll take care of Magruder immediately afterwards."
Magruder originally testified that he presented Liddy's proposal for the burglary as part of a pared-down, $250,000 "intelligence" operation code-named "Gemstone" for Mitchell's approval during a meeting in Key Biscayne on March 30, 1972.
In his new, more dramatic account, Magruder says Mitchell was reluctant to approve the plan without instructions from the White House. So, as they sat together on the patio of Mitchell's vacation home, Magruder telephoned Haldeman aide Gordon Strachan in Washington, who got his boss on the line.
"Haldeman indicated to me that the president wanted us to go ahead," Magruder recounted. Then, "Haldeman said he wanted to talk to John [Mitchell]. It was a short discussion." After a few moments, Magruder, sitting next to Mitchell, heard a new, distinctive voice from the telephone receiver -- Nixon's.
"I didn't hear every single word," Magruder said. What he recalls hearing Nixon say was: "John, we need to -- we need to get the information on [Democratic Party Chairman] Larry O'Brien. And the only way we can do that is through Liddy's plan. And you need to do that."
Ben-Veniste said Magruder's story, if it is accepted, would settle "one of the nagging questions of Watergate."
"The motivation of the operation being the collection of intelligence information on Larry O'Brien is in fact consistent with other information we have," he said.
Reeves said that nothing in the unpublished pages of Haldeman's often candid diaries supports the story. But one Nixon tape might, the historian said. "It's from a year after the Key Biscayne meeting," he said. "Nixon was talking to Secretary of State William Rogers." It was a long, rambling conversation about Watergate, and Nixon may have been testing an explanation in case Magruder did blame Haldeman or the president himself.
"I think Mitchell authorized it," Nixon said on the tape. ". . . They were supposed to get the intelligence, and then they have this wild-eyed scheme involving Liddy . . . Then, at a later time, they went on and went ahead. . . . So Magruder will probably say that [unintelligible] either that he had pressure from Haldeman, which he will claim . . . I think it was Mitchell."
Ultimately, it may be impossible to confirm the story in the absence of a tape, a "smoking gun," in the vivid parlance of the Watergate scandal. And with the other players in their graves, it may be impossible to disprove.
Magruder laughed ruefully last week when he remembered what Mitchell said after hanging up the telephone that day. "He said, 'Well, Jeb, tell [campaign treasurer] Maury Stans to give Liddy $250,000, and let's see what happens.' "
" 'Let's see what happens,' " Magruder repeated. "In retrospect, that's kind of hilarious."
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